Sewing With Dummies: How To Make a Book Cover

Before I begin, let me confess that I read crafting blogs and I have never, until now, appreciated the difficulty of taking step by step pictures of the entire process. Thumbs up miscellaneous skirt-sewing bloggers!

So, I found an old plastic book cover in the bins at Goodwill a few years ago and fell in love with it. First, they come with bookmarks already attached so there is no danger of misplacing them. Second, while I would practically mount a 24 hour neon sign on a head band pointing at my copy of any work by Dostoevsky under my arm, I don't mind covering some of the more passionate Neels clinches from my four-year-old.

Anyway, here's a simple 15 minute project for a basic book cover. Just know that I am a very simple, basic sewer and everything I know I learned from Betty Debbie. I will, in the instructions, assume you are too stupid to tie your own shoes.

I cut outside cloth, inside cloth and interfacing fabric (doesn't need to be iron-on. This is just to give a little heft) each 10.25" x 8" for the main body of the book cover. Now that I've used them I think that you could tighten up these numbers a smidge for these particular books but, to quote Edna Mode, "I made it a little roomy for the free movement." The larger number would work well for omnibuses and thicker books but for the smaller, I'd maybe cut it 9.75" x 8".
Cut two panels, each one 3.5" x 8" for the inside cover flaps in the fabric of your choice. Making this wider is also possible if you desire extra stability for your books but 3 and a half inches worked well for me. (If you want to make these more heavy duty, just double the width of the fabric, fold it in half and stick a piece of interfacing (I'd probably use iron-on for this) between it and skip the next two steps.)
Double fold one edge of each of your inside cover flaps and iron down.
Top stitch that ironed edge.
Place cover flaps on the piece of fabric you want to go on the inside--making sure that the finished edges face the middle. Also, add a ribbon bookmark at this point, just to the left of the right book flap.Stack the 'outside fabric', face down on the previous stack. Place the interfacing on top of that.
Pin around the edges and begin sewing along the bottom edge, about an inch and a half from dead center, allowing for a quarter inch seam. (You'll want to start so that you're sewing into the book flap quite soon.) Sew all the way around (backing over the bookmark for extra stability) until you are roughly three inches away from where you started. (Again, you don't want to stop until after you've gone over the book flap part.)
Reaching into your three inch hole, pull it inside out--being sure to check for gaps and pushing all the corners out. Lazy cheaters will then top stitch over the hole (being careful to tuck the rough edges inside.) but the rest of us will blind-stitch the opening for a more finished look.I knocked out 7 of these bad boys in an hour or two, with the toddler playing a few feet from me. The cutting takes the most time and it's funner if you can do that all at once and then go from there.
And then I named them. Here are some:

Flattering Rosy-Pink Lampshade

The Araminta
(Unassuming on the outside but...)

Implied Conjugal Relations in Remote Scottish Cottage

This one was harder. It has a windmill, so there's the Dutch thing but toile always reminds me of Paris. So, of course it had to be:

Trampy Husband-Snatching Ward

We may have to have another contest for Bettysday...